The Newsletter | No.77 | Summer 2017 The Focus | 29 theFocus

Learning to love the city in Northeast India The rapid urbanization of India’s Northeast frontier1 is one of the most crucial transformations the area has witnessed, yet it remains relatively understudied. In just a few decades a large number of the inhabitants have become urban dwellers in one of the frontier cities, or migrants in cities in the rest of India and abroad. Urban areas in the frontier have diverse histories and some common experiences. Colonisation, resource extraction, stations for supply, and militarisation are some of the shared features. These processes have persisted in postcolonial India along with the growth in administrative quarters and buildings (and cars) for the bureaucrats of newly created political units (new federal states and autonomous districts), new military installations and housing, and population growth from migration for those seeking work, refuge, and education. Despite this history, urban environments are rarely part of imaginations of the frontier, especially in the production and circulation of images and the stereotypes of plantations, jungle insurgency, spectacular topography, and colourfully dressed ethnic minority communities. In this Focus section we explore the urban environments in the Northeast frontier – India’s ‘unruly borderland’ 2 – as crucial sites in their own right, and as sites in which to experiment with different ways of researching the region.

Duncan McDuie-Ra

Mizoram. Image reproduced under a creative commons license courtesy of Joe Fanai on Flickr. The Newsletter | No.77 | Summer 2017 30 | The Focus

Learning to love the city in Northeast India continued

Urban frontiers and frontier urbanism North Eastern States perform a much higher order function “Urban areas in the Northeast are so small!” sceptics cry; than those of similar size in India.”6 Finally, all Northeast “How can they be worthy of attention?” To begin with, the states have Municipal Acts, most created in the previous two threshold for being considered ‘urban’ in India is quite low. decades with recent amendments. While the Acts vary, they The census uses two criteria to define urban areas: have provoked controversy and contention around issues (a) All statutory places with a municipality, corporation, such as property tax (both the need to pay it and who has cantonment board or notified town area committee and the right to levy it), elections (there are reservations based (b) A place satisfying the following three criteria simultaneously: on indigeneity and gender), and constitutional protections for (i) a minimum population of 5,000; (ii) at least 75 percent of tribal and indigenous communities (and whether or not land the male working population engaged in non-agricultural under municipal authority is subject to existing protection pursuits; and (iii) a population density of at least 400 per laws). While state governments amend their municipal square kilometre. This criteria allows for smaller sites beyond acts in the hope of accessing more funds for infrastructure state capitals and large commercial hubs, like Kakching and enabling infamous sub-contracting practices, private (Manipur), Lunglei (Mizoram) and Pasighat (Arunachal Pradesh), capital – much of which originates in other parts of India to be considered as emerging urban forms; sites that dissolve – continues to shape the urban environment through the urban-rural distinction. commercial and residential developments, consumer spaces, Two dynamics can be considered, in addition to just the and the supply of consumer goods (from plasma televisions size of a settlement: urban population growth and municipal to house paint). expansion. The 2011 census recorded extensive growth in urban populations. The percentage of the overall population Emerging urban forms living in urban areas in each of the Northeast states in 2011 Research on small cities in developing contexts is dwarfed was as follows (with the increase since 2001 in brackets): by an obsession with mega-cities and global cities, what Mizoram 52% (+3%), Manipur 31% (+6%), Nagaland 29% (+12%), Bunnell and Maringanti refer to as ‘metrocentricity’. They Tripura 26% (+9%), Sikkim 25% (+14%), Arunachal Pradesh 23% argue that not enough attention is paid to emerging urban (+2%), Meghalaya 20% (+1%) and Assam 14% (+2%), compared forms and call for more engaged ethnographic work, work to a national average of 31% (3%). that cannot be done from afar.7 This echoes the agenda put However, the urban population growth data refers only forth by Bell and Jayne to take small cities more seriously, to areas actually classified as urban. Across India, urbanization a crucial task in developing countries generally where outside former municipal boundaries is responsible for almost “two-thirds of urban residents live in places of less than a third of urban growth for the period 2001 and 2011,3 yet, 1 million people”.8 They argue that “a number of ‘imaginative as Denis et al. argue, there are incentives for maintaining a leaps’ must be taken by theorists currently hung up on the rural classification in India (mostly eligibility for certain forms notion that globalization of the city means globalization of Fig. 1: Churches for Learning to love the city…on foot of government assistance) and so many densely populated the metropolis”.9 This recalls Mathews’ explorations of what different tribal com- Urban environments in the Northeast encourage different ‘built up’ areas that adjoin cities continue to be classified he calls ‘low-end globalization’, defined as “the transnational munities and future entry points for inquiry and exploration and here I want to as rural areas.4 In much of the Northeast this classification flow of people and goods involving relatively small amounts meat point. Sovima, focus on mobility through urban space. Purposeful mobility carries additional significance given that land laws, which of capital and informal, sometimes quasi-legal or illegal Dimapur. December from designated points – government office to NGO rally 2016 (Photo by protect indigenous and tribal communities, are often transactions, commonly associated within the developing (often in a vehicle) – are common routes, yet emerging urban Duncan McDuie-Ra). non-applicable to designated municipal areas. Historically, world”.10 These secondary flows are evident throughout forms can best be captured on foot, and in many instances, city-level governance, compared to state and district level, the frontier, whether Karen refugees from Myanmar-via by accident. Walking ethnography is an ideal entry point into has always been weak in India; an issue further complicated Thailand attending theological college in Nagaland, or the the urban environment of the frontier. It brings researchers in the Northeast by overlapping layers of authority (including network of Tibetan traders moving ‘counterfeit’ clothing into contact with people, places, and objects that were traditional decision making bodies), and until recently there and footwear from Southeast Asia via China to the markets otherwise unknown, unnoticed, or seen only at a blurred has been little incentive to expand the territory under of the region. distance through a vehicle window. As Cheng argues, municipal authority. Small urban areas – and the vernacular urbanism they “[w]alking not only guides us through encounters with This, however, is changing. There are now new incentives produce – are a hard sell in the Northeast where research other human beings, but also embeds us in a dense network to enlarge and/or create municipal areas in the frontier. remains focused on cultural change (narrowly defined as of materials, ranging from skyscraping buildings to the The Ministry of Urban Development has a number of flagship tradition versus modernity), conflict and ethnic politics, most mundane of everyday objects such as lampposts or schemes. From 2015 the Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and and of course the borders, fences, and roads that connect sidewalks’.11 And in a region where research can often take Urban Transformation has provided infrastructure funding and obstruct. Despite this lack of interest, urban areas in a predictable trajectory, any opportunity to encounter to 500 cities in India: four in Assam, two in Nagaland, and the frontier are crucial sites in which to analyze state-led something new, unexpected, and (hopefully) significant one each in the other Northeast states (all are state capitals). development, liberalization and securitization, agrarian should be welcomed. Here I identify three ways of considering The Smart Cities Mission (also from 2015) aims to “promote change and land issues, territorial claims and counter-claims, Fig. 2: Newspaper urban areas, gleaned from my walking ethnography in cities that provide core infrastructure and give a decent quality and connectivity (both state-led and state-evading). Urban clippings celebrating urban areas of the Northeast over the last 15 years; all three of life to its citizens, a clean and sustainable environment and areas in the frontier are sites where the past is manifest in the community resonate with the approaches taken in the essays in this Focus service of the Central application of ‘Smart Solutions’.”5 There are five Smart Cities material objects, the built environment, demography, and section and serve as examples of possible ways to research Reserve Police Force in the Northeast: Agartala, Guwahati, Imphal, Kohima, and the spatial order. They have witnessed the region throughout urban areas of the Northeast (certainly not the only ways). (CRPF) for public dis- Namchi. Furthermore, the Ministry of Urban Development the centuries, yet they are more than just arenas where play. Thangal Bazar, dedicates 10% of its annual budget to the Northeast (as do broader economic, social, and political dynamics play Imphal. December 1. Spatial violence other ministries) and explains: “[g]iven the difficult access out; they are also sites where these dynamics are created, 2012 (Photo by For a region that has experienced horrific levels of organised to and remoteness of (the Northeast), the urban areas in the channeled, and challenged. Duncan McDuie-Ra). violence by state, non-state and quasi-state actors – in the public sphere and the private sphere – little consideration has been given to how violence has created particular spatial orders in urban environments. Herscher and Siddiqi ask us to consider the spatial histories of political violence, with their own sequences, continuities, and ruptures. Spatial violence calls for us to hone our understanding of the deeper and slower structural forms of violence that contour political historical categories such as ‘development’, ‘reconstruction’, ‘modernity’, ‘peace’, ‘progress’, and so on, which they argue is “a constitutive dimension of architecture, urbanism, and their epistemologies”.12 In the frontier, neighbourhoods, public buildings, commercial areas, houses, slums, parks, ceasefire camps, barracks and memorials all tell stories of past and present relationships of power and violence. In Imphal (Manipur) a paramilitary base dwarfs the adjacent Kabui neighbourhood in Ragailong. Entering the locality from the south necessitates walking past watchtowers and gun posts, a common routine in a city scattered with checkpoints, barracks, and surveillance. It is not just fissures between the civilian and military space that are striking; multistorey houses of the elite and well-connected (to both state and non-state power) with high fences and a fleet of cars parked on the lawn, rise adjacent to bamboo thatch and mud shacks. Settlements started by families seeking refuge from violence have grown into neighbourhoods and communities. Some become legible parts of the city, others remain distant from state authority, while in others settlers face struggles against threats of eviction. Juxtapositions help to illustrate these relationships. King describes juxtapositions as attention to the positioning “of the dissimilar and even the incompatible”, drawing attention to the ways space is appropriated, officially and unofficially, temporarily and more permanently, all of which drive change, The Newsletter | No.77 | Summer 2017 The Focus | 31

reflecting past and present configurations of power and their accompanying imaginations.13 The urban Northeast is full of captivating juxtapositions: such as the line of ui sa (dog meat) shops across the roads from an Assam Rifles memorial and mandir (Hindu temple) in central Aizawl, or Karbi women from across the inter-state border between Assam and Nagaland selling silkworms from cardboard boxes on the pavement outside KFC in Dimapur. Urban areas host a concentration of development projects, most visible in infrastructure or lack thereof, reflecting deeper and slower forms of violence and exclusion shaped by powerful players within and outside state institutions. Useless showpiece development projects, such as a (now empty) outdoor aquarium in Namchi – a town with chronic water shortages – or the day/night cricket stadium at Sovima on the outskirts of Dimapur, are touted to the public as exemplars of modernity, of putting a town ‘on the map’. Other infrastructure reflects long histories of extraction, like the Oil and Natural Gas Corporation facilities on the outskirts of Dibrugarh, while the comically narrow Bir Tiekndrajit Flyover in Imphal and the foul pollution of the Wah Umkhrah in Shillong are testament to the impacts of rapid urbanization and (meager) attempts by civilian authorities to grapple with these impacts. Some of these projects inspire pride, some hope, some embarrassment or disgust, and others are repurposed for entirely different uses as they age, become dilapidated and go to ruin. The search for exceptional spaces in urban areas also needs to account for normalcy, and indeed the unstable ground upon which ‘normal’ and ‘exceptional’ can be understood in the Northeast. Parks, malls, theatres, cemeteries, bus stations, are important sites where people live out their lives, sometimes even – in the case of the 3. Sensory experiences Fig. 3: Aia upate zah R.K Debarmma begins his account of Agartala, the gardens on U-Chiyok in Kakching – in full view of acres Finally, in the built environment and astounding visual thiam Mizo Zemawi capital of Tripura, with protests for an indigenous state of military infrastructure. culture of the urban Northeast, sense plays an important role [Respecting Elders is and the demonization of the protestors by the state. in the articulation and demarcation of space. As Low argues, the Mizo character], This sets up an account of Tripura as a settler colonial 2. Visual culture “[e]veryday experiences of the senses take on an emotional transl. Lallianpuii; state during the British period and especially after Partition billboard facing Visual culture in the urban Northeast is astounding. Freitag character, where heightened feelings become apparent in of South Asia in 1947. Agartala is the main arena where basketball court. encourages the use of visual resources for understanding the encounter between sensory selves and sensory others”.15 spatial contests between settlers and indigenous Zarkawt, Aizawl. public culture in urban South Asia. She posits that in such In urban areas attempts to articulate and enforce acceptable February 2014 communities play out, making it a settler colonial town. rapidly changing sites paintings, photographs, posters, sensory behaviour characterises relationships between ethnic (Photo by Duncan Dolly Kikon discusses the controversy over the sale of maps, and three dimensional objects are “witnesses to the communities, often drawing a line between indigenous and McDuie-Ra). dog meat in Dimapur, Nagaland. Opposition to dog meat changing ‘communication context’ predicated on visual migrant, or dominant and marginal, with the latter the subject sales from a government determined to make Dimapur literacy that transcended multiple languages and scripts”, of grievances for the physical, sonic, visual, and olfactory more ‘city-like’ and activists concerned with animal and depend “on new dissemination networks, repletion… affect on local space; such as the smell from the food different welfare exist alongside the persistence of impunity for and thickly-entwined inter-ocular references”.14 Urban communities cook and eat, or the noise from particular the armed forces in their treatment of humans in Dimapur areas in the Northeast are covered in images and text that religious worship and festivals. Senses also affect relationships and beyond. If sales are to be banned what will become reflect a lived cosmopolitanism – and it’s limits – that both among communities along class lines; for instance, poorer of the traders, mostly women, who peddle the meat accompanies and challenges dominant ways of understanding areas are perceived as ‘smelly’ by some urban residents in Dimapur’s markets? the region and its component parts. Consider advertisements because of the rubbish, the industry (metal works, incineration, In presenting this collection we advocate for and (government and private) on billboards, painted directly on animal slaughter), and noise owing to overcrowded dwellings encourage research that explores urban areas in the Northeast walls, shutters, or handed out on flyers. Some advertisements and raucous behaviour often linked to rural sensibilities and of varying sizes and official classifications. Such research are vandalised, some are defaced, some are marked with alcohol consumption, while wealthier areas are imagined as offers new insights into the Northeast and new possibilities particular scripts – such as Meitei Mayek – that turn quiet, odour free, clean, and ‘decent’. And between residents for comparative research on urbanism in frontiers elsewhere conventional advertisements for, say, telecommunications and the authorities, for instance, sensory disturbances are in Asia. companies into statements about place and territory. taken as indicators of ineffective urban governance and thus Billboards for education fares, training colleges, apartment the smell of burning garbage and polluted watercourses, Duncan McDuie-Ra is Professor complexes (often in other cities), cars, or global restaurant the noise and pollution of heavy vehicle traffic, and the of Development Studies at UNSW, Australia chains reveal changing perceptions of the frontier as a aesthetic breaches of the built environment contribute to the ([email protected]). consumer market producing and reflecting the aspirations perceptions of civilian authorities as corrupt, inept, or incapable and desires of the residents, visitors, and interlopers. and that development remains elusive and mismanaged. Common throughout the region are billboards publicising References the armed forces and paramilitary, marking sites of control, In this Focus section six authors approach six different urban 1 The federal states of Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Manipur, and littering the landscape with propaganda such as ‘Friends environments in Northeast India from diverse disciplinary Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Sikkim, Tripura. of the Hill People’ and enlarged newspaper clippings touting perspectives. The collection is exploratory rather than 2 A term coined by Bengt Karlsson. See Karlsson, B. 2011. community initiatives (see fig. 2). Civilian governments, exhaustive. Bengt Karlsson discusses the nostalgia hanging Unruly Hills: a political ecology of India’s Northeast. Delhi: both local and national, mark space with their presence over Shillong: a former colonial hill station and now the Orient Blackswan on foundation stones, inauguration plaques, and details capital of Meghalaya. Within overlapping forms of governance 3 Pradhan, K.C. 2012. Unacknowledged urbanization: the census of funding schemes utilised to build a bridge, seal a road, and all the associated problems of rapid urbanisation on a towns of India. New Delhi: Centre for Policy Research. or upgrade a bus station. limited amount of land, Karlsson considers the best way to 4 Denis, E., P. Mukhopadhyay, & M.H. Zérah. 2012. ‘Subaltern Alternative scripts appear as graffiti made with etchings, think about contemporary Shillong, settling for analysing Urbanization in India’, Economic and Political Weekly spray paint, and stencils announcing support for a particular it as a ‘tribal city’; one unable to come to terms with the 47(30):52-62. underground group, declaring undying love in multiple present in favour of memories of the past. Lallianpuii uses 5 Ministry of Urban Development. 2016. Annual Report 2015-16. languages, and as public art; most noticeable in Aizawl and an account of print media in Mizoram and surrounding Mizo New Delhi: Ministry of Urban Development, p.2. Gangtok where cement walls have been given over to local speaking areas to situate Aizawl city, the state capital, as the 6 Ibid., p.72. graffiti artists. Posters for election candidates, advertising centre of the transnational Mizo world. Bucking the trend of 7 Bunnell, T. & A. Maringanti. 2010. ‘Practising urban and tuition courses and medical care (including almost region- a global downturn in print circulation, demand for daily print regional research beyond metrocentricity’, International wide attention to piles and fistula), and announcing army media emanating from Aizawl can barely keep up with supply, Journal of Urban and Regional Research 34(2):417. recruitment, are pasted onto electricity poles and cement revealing the need for news produced close to the corridors 8 Bell, D. & M. Jayne. 2009. ‘Small cities? Towards a research walls and live on in various stages of decay. Handwritten signs of political power – from the Mizo metropolis. agenda’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research direct relatives and well-wishers to funerals, weddings, and Sanjay Barbora analyses three dynamics that have shaped 33(3):689. prayer meetings; often wedged onto an existing signboard the history of Dibrugarh in upper-Assam: capital, calamity, 9 Ibid., p.690. or affixed to a bamboo stake. Red stains from betel nut and and counter-insurgency. These dynamics produce what he 10 Mathews, G. 2007. ‘Chungking Mansions: A Center of white clumps of lime paste mark the built environment refers to as a ‘counterintuitive urban transformation’ evident “Low-End Globalization”’, Ethnology 46(2):170. with the presence of passers-by, often haphazardly, but in the tea gardens in the city centre, the oil installations and 11 Cheng, Yi’En. 2014. ‘Telling stories of the city: walking occasionally with purpose targeting the face of a politician gas cracker plants on the outskirts, and the ‘silent social ethnography, affective materialities, and mobile encounters’, or a particular storefront. Less obvious yet also instructive relations’ of the city’s multi-ethnic population. Mona Chettri Space and Culture 17(3):213. are the names on businesses and publicly displayed licences considers the infrastructure-driven growth of Chungthang in 12 Hescher, A. & A. I. Siddiqi. 2014. ‘Spatial Violence’, revealing the commercial power of particular ethnic north Sikkim alongside the enduring presence of the armed Architectural Theory Review 19(3):270-271. communities, and these may change as one moves through forces deployed to monitor the border with China. At the 13 King, R. 2011. Reading Bangkok. Singapore: NUS Press, p.12. different localities. Hand-painted locality maps, snippets of centre of the town, between an enormous hydropower dam 14 Frietag, S. B. 2014. ‘A Visual History of Three Lucknows’, religious texts, and civic and moral instructions such as Aia and various army barracks, is a Sikh Gurdwara (temple) built South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies XXXVII(3):401. upate zah thiam Mizo Zemawi [Respecting Elders is the Mizo by the armed forces and currently at the heart of contentions 15 Low, K.E., 2013. ‘Sensing cities: the politics of migrant character], add further layers of text and image. (see fig. 3) over cultural history, space, and ‘belonging’ in Sikkim. sensescapes’, Social Identities 19(2):226.